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The great mystery of the U.S. presidential race is not that Donald Trump is doing so well. He isn’t.

Rather it is that Hillary Clinton is doing so badly.

In any rational scenario, the Republican nominee should be easy meat.

He is a serial bankrupt who, during his career has left customers and suppliers alike high and dry.

His take-no-prisoners approach to immigration, combined with his remarkable rudeness, has alienated entire voting blocs, including women, Hispanics and Muslims.

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Even for a politician, he is singularly untruthful. PolitiFact, a project of the Tampa Bay Times, has rated 35 per cent of his statements as flat-out false and an additional 18 per cent as “pants-on-fire” whoppers.

His platform contains some content. But much is a hodgepodge of braggadocio and bluster.

He says, for instance, that he has a foolproof plan to defeat the Islamic terror group known as Daesh, or ISIS.

But he won’t say what this plan is.

He is an acknowledged lawbreaker. He has broken election financing and lobbying laws in two states and been fined for so doing.

He has mounted a campaign that, for the longest time, was disorganized and incoherent. He has gone through two campaign directors and is now on the third.

He has few workers on the ground to get out the vote and has run few television ads.

According to public opinion surveys, he is the most unpopular presidential candidate since polling began.

Even the leaders of his own party don’t much like him.

And yet still Clinton struggles to beat him. The polls, which had been in her favour, are beginning to tighten up — both nationally and in all-important swing states, such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Real Clear Politics, which averages recent polls, shows the two in a virtual tie nationally.

How can that be?

Alas for the Democrats, the answer seems to be that Clinton — while perhaps able as an administrator — is a terrible presidential candidate.

Her friends insist she is warm and personable in private. But on television, she comes across as strident and defensive.

She is so wary of the press that it became news around the world last week when she finally allowed reporters onto her campaign plane.

Her platform is more comprehensive and nuanced than Trump’s. But I suspect few American voters would be able to tell you what’s in it.

And like Trump, she is not entirely truthful. According to PolitiFact, she tells fewer whoppers and flat-out falsehoods than Trump. But she makes many more statements that are rated “mostly false.”

Indeed, when the three categories of “mostly false”, “false” and “pants on fire” are added up. Trump and Clinton almost tie. Some 71 per cent of his statements are rated untruthful compared to 28 per cent for Clinton.

The main difference is that his lies are more flagrant.

All of this may help explain why her approval ratings are just slightly above Trump’s.

And things are not getting better. There is a weird sense of desperation about the Clinton campaign.

Her latest assault on Trump, labelling him unpatriotic for praising Russian President Vladimir Putin, seems contrived even for the U.S.

It’s as if her campaign team can’t think of anything better.

Trump was not being anti-American last week when he called Putin a better leader than U.S. President Barack Obama. He was being revealing.

The Republican candidate admires Putin because he gets things done — regardless of the diplomatic niceties.

In effect, Trump was signalling what kind of leader he would be if elected.

It’s possible that Americans do want a latter-day Mussolini as their president. But I doubt it. I’d guess that most would prefer that someone other than Trump move into the White House next January.

So far, Hillary Clinton has given them little reason to make sure that person will be her.

Thomas Walkom’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Correction - September 14, 2016: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated Hillary Clinton's falsehood score as calculated by PolitiFact as 69 per cent.

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